The real story of the Amazon's 'lost city' |
The Amazon's 'lost city' has been widely misunderstood. This is its true story
This sprawling ancient metropolis in the jungle of Ecuador has revealed a unique form of urbanism found only in the Amazon. Sofia Quaglia visits the site for the story of this mysterious civilisation.
Archaeologist Alden Yépez hikes through a field of bright green grass, swinging his rusty machete left and right to carve a path in the shoulder-height tropical pasture. He's following his handheld GPS device with a certain haste: we must make it out of the grassland before sundown. At this pace, though, it takes just a swift 30 minutes to emerge from the body-slamming vegetation.
"We're here," he says, panting. He and I are now surrounded by small, steep hills forming something like a labyrinth around us. Once inside the system of formations, its man-made nature becomes clearer – amongst the tall grass there is a deep, long path and eight mounds organised in a geometrical pattern. One hill has a path sliced through it, and I see its interior of stratified mud with different shades of bright brown.
Yépez is an expert in ancient Amazonia from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador (Puce), and this is what is known as the Huapula Site. It is one of the densest networks of man-made mounds yet found inside Ecuador's so-called "lost city" of the Amazon – a sprawling system of dozens of such clusters.
Local archaeologists have known of some of these formations for 50 years, but the sheer scale of this 3,000-year-old urban landscape has only recently surfaced thanks to new mapping technology.
The discovery has helped upend the long-held idea that ancient Amazon-dwellers were only small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers: instead reinforcing the theory that they were likely organised into sophisticated civilisations capable of creating complex urban networks.
However, as we learn more about these connected mounds, it's becoming clear they were not "cities" in the classical sense we understand them today, but rather a kind of urbanism unique to the Amazon jungle: low-density and multicentric, harnessing the strengths and weaknesses of the surrounding forest.
What is still unclear, though, is how and why this intricate world was made – and what will happen to it now that it's been discovered.
It was after a tip from a friend that Jesuit priest Pedro Porras started studying the first earthen platforms of Huapula in the valley of the Upano River of eastern Ecuador.
In 1978, under the shadow of the gurgling Sangay volcano, Porras spent more than 200 days digging up 15 different areas of the valley. One of his most famous excavation areas in the Huapula site is where he sliced open a large central mound to see the stratification of mud – the one Yépez and I walked through.
In the 1990s, archaeologists began to expand on his work with other small, scattered excavations and preliminary attempts at mapping. Then, in July 2015, the Ecuadorian National Institute for Cultural Heritage (INPC) decided to map a 600 sq km (230 sq mile) area using light detection and ranging (Lidar) technology.
Technicians working for INPC flew over the valley in an aeroplane, shooting millions of laser pulses to the ground. Lidar uses ultra-thin light beams that seep through tiny gaps in foliage, bounce off the soil, and return reams of data that can be used to make intricate 3D maps of the ground.
It is several recent analyses of this data, released around a decade after these scans were first made, which have revealed that Porras' preliminary discoveries were part of a much larger picture than was previously appreciated.
The site contains a massive, sprawling network of almost 7,500 man-made structures, according to one of these analyses, published in 2023 by experts commissioned by the INPC. These include over 5,000 earthen platforms, around 1,500 hills and hundreds of rounded mounds, plaza-like areas, terraces and paths, roads, ditches and drainages.
The platforms were connected by trenches and roads and their use may have changed throughout the seasons, according to another analysis of the same data by French researchers in 2024.
A further team of archaeologists in Ecuador, led by Yépez, has created a publicly-available 3D mapping of the sites and is working on further analyses.
The ancient Amazonian inhabitants, it seems, were making huge, sophisticated urban areas, shaping the forest floor's mud to make hills and mounds atop of which to live on and congregate, as well as roads and potentially rivers to connect them.
"It's pure compacted earth that they shaped, oriented and positioned," says Rita Litben, an independent researcher based in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and part of the two-person team commissioned by INPC to first analyse its data. "We're talking about natural elements that they modified into massive earthworks."
For centuries, it was assumed that before the 15th-Century arrival of the Spanish in Latin America, the Amazon's geography and climate meant it could only host small, scattered populations of hunter-gatherers. This was crystalised in the now-discredited theory of environmental determinism, popularised in the 1950s and 1960s by American archaeologist Betty Meggers, which said that the harsh and hot tropical climate of the Amazon would naturally undermine human progress.
But the recent Upano Valley findings add to a growing body of research using Lidar – with studies conducted in Brazil, Colombia and more – suggesting that the Amazon has actually long been the home of budding sophisticated civilisations systematically changing their landscape to fit their social needs.
"In light of this new technology, we have to rethink Amazonian settlements, we need to reconsider our perspective on what Amazonian........